After gaining success in their home market, some Chinese brands started to aggressively expand their battlefields to the markets outside China. When trying to penetrate the international market, it goes without saying that a range of ammunition is needed when trying to break through to consumers that don’t know anything about you.

Circus Social was able to equip our clients with a user-friendly and intuitive platform and save the brand owners and marketers a great deal of effort and time. We empowered our China-based clients to obtain real-time business intelligence on overseas markets to achieve success while operating behind the “Great Firewall”.

1. Industry Trend & Hot Topic Monitoring and Analysis:
By monitoring global emerging business trends and topic evolution over time, our China-based client could get a crystal clear picture on past and on-going industry trends as well as the “share of voice” of specific topics across global online and offline media platforms. Analysis on news publications and key industry topics they were covering also helped our client identify the most influential and active news publications covering the topics relevant to them.

2. Competitor Monitoring and Analysis:
It goes without saying that competitor intelligence is critical for strategy formulation, and for key branding and marketing decisions. Circus Social’s analytics and monitoring platform, 20/Twenty, monitored major activity, customer perception, and hot topics relevant on competitors across various time frames, geographies, and channels. Thus keeping our client updated about competitors’ brand mentions, conversation volumes/trends, and key announcements. This was crucial for our client as they wanted global visibility – not only local coverage on themselves and their competitors.

4. A Close-up Analysis of Impactful Stories
In the past, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and B2B business models used to drive success for Chinese brands in their home market. However, building up a home-grown brand to be one with global awareness, requires local players to embrace innovation, gain a better understanding about their competitors and most importantly adopt a mental shift of focus from key OEM customers to global consumers. Through Circus Social’s detailed analysis and reports, our clients were able to uncover the most impactful stories and hot topics in the industry – and hence dig deeper into the key insights behind the trends. We were able to make recommendations from the data that allowed our client to identify exactly which articles or trends across global media and publications were influencing consumer perceptions, preferences and interests. The summary of impactful coverage also helped our China-based client to quickly capture the essence of each impactful article in each trending category so they could better focus PR efforts to the publications that mattered most.

Get in touch with us to know how Circus Social can be part of your solution when conquering new markets outside your home country!

On the day India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, declared the currency demonetization, the country witnessed a mixed reaction from its people. The very next day, the whole country was in turmoil and rushed to exchange these notes from banks and their ATMs, – only to find that banks and ATMs were struggling to meet these suddenly increased demands. Widespread chaos ensued across the nation and hundreds of thousands of people were adversely affected, most evidently the lower strata including farmers, daily wage earners, middle class and SME’s. Even large corporates were forced to shut operations for multiple days and lay off hundreds of employees. Other incidents representative of the impact of demonetization were the endless long queues of harried, starving and deprived men and women in front of ATMs and banks, once flourishing street stalls and shops, now a deserted scene.
The decision made by PM Modi to demonetize 86% of the notes in circulation was one that was initiated with various interests in mind. The one thing that it has undoubtedly successfully accomplished, is that of the widescale adoption of digital payments technology by Indians of all strata, nationwide.

In the wake of this massive push towards digital payments technology and moving towards a cashless, economy in India- one of our payments solutions clients saw this as a great opportunity to leverage their presence and services. The global payments company sought to identify more growth opportunities for their business and to increase share and adoption of its digital payments solutions. At such an opportune time, in order for it to reach out to this massive audience, it was extremely crucial to identify and understand the voice of public opinion, thoughts and issues surrounding this new loss of currency. An understanding of what the masses felt, what were their pain points and issues, could help the brand provide a solution in the form of its services which at its core was all about going cashless and embracing digital means of payments.

This is where 20/Twenty, our proprietary social intelligence and listening platform, helped the brand achieve insight and clear view into the opinions, thoughts and trends of the consumers moving to digital payments in India. A continued study of competition has also helped the brand keep a close tab on competitors as well as payment wallet solution providers’ activities of interest.

We at Circus Social, leveraged data from 20/Twenty to deliver daily insight reports which informed the brand of key developments and areas of opportunity with the following assessments –

• Consumer sentiments towards demonetization
• Identification of pain points of consumers as well as SME’s
• Tracking various campaign efforts of the government and competitors to learn what worked and resonated
• Tracking daily updates of other e-wallet companies like Paytm, MobiKwik etc.
• Measuring and categorizing different types of consumer engagement
• Identifying key influencers

The client also leveraged our social listening platform to get daily automated alerts when there were key issues being discussed, changes in consumer sentiment as well as growing trends. Alerts were based on keywords and consumer sentiments, when they reached a particular threshold the client received a notification. These e-mail alerts helped our client to be alerted to new and important updates and changes around India’s demonetization fiasco. With the help of 20/Twenty, the team was able to tap into the pulse of the masses and understand their sentiment on the whole demonetization drive.

Here are some of the interesting trends and insights from this crucial period:

• Over a period of two months’ people have understood that downloading an e-wallet app to pay bills is very convenient. Hence, adoption has been quick and easy with people using their e-wallets for to pay almost everything now including mobile bills/recharge, utility bills, cab bookings, movie tickets, etc.
• Post demonetization, e-wallet companies like Paytm, MobiKwik and FreeCharge have seen a huge surge in their daily transactions like never before. Paytm, MobiKwik, FreeCharge have already been in the overdrive to reach out to small traders to commence transactions on their platform. From running full-page ads in newspapers to making their presence felt on TV and digital, Paytm, FreeCharge, MobiKwik etc. are focusing on educating the consumers, expanding their user base and promoting cashless transactions.
• Moreover, since a lot of merchants don’t have card readers for debit/credit transactions, they have started to accept e-wallets as a mode of payment.
• Despite the positive developments post demonetization there still exists a section of people who are unhappy with PM’s decision of currency ban as they are forced to stand in long ques to withdraw their own cash. Also there are shops which still don’t accept any form of e-payment
• Infrastructure still a problem as its unable to cope with demands for new cash. ATMs are constantly out of cash and long queues till the wee hours of the morning persist resulting in severe consequences for consumers with them unable to pay and support their day-to-day consumption.
Whether or not India will benefit from the demonetization drive is still a big question mark but Mr. Modi’s demonetization initiative has definitely been a boon for India’s e-payment providers and they definitely have right future.
The future of e-payment providers:
• The future seems to be extremely strong. Smaller restaurants, vegetable venders are now open to accepting e-wallet payment, some merchants do not accept credit/debit cards but are now accepting e-wallet transactions.
• There has been a constant increase in the number of electronic transactions since demonetization started. Out of the 700 million debit card users in the country, 450 million earlier used the facility only at ATMs. Now, they are swiping cards at PoS (point-of-sale) terminals. This is encouraging for a move to a cashless economy.
• E-wallet transactions are convenient as these are conducted through mobile phones with internet connection.
• This is the time, for Digital Wallet Companies to grow further and be the next way of growth because people are moving towards digital life by accessing internet facility to their life.

So far so positive, but what could hold back this trend?
Having specified the benefits of electronic payment system, it is necessary to mention its drawbacks:
• Restrictions: Each payment system has certain restrictions regarding the maximum amount in the account, the number of transactions per day and the withdrawal amount.
• The risk of being hacked: As more and more people download and figure out how to use mobile wallets such as MobiKwik, FreeCharge or Paytm, there is also increasing concern over the security of transactions on these apps. If one follows the security rules the threat is lesser. Most reputed wallets adhere to all RBI security specifications and also have extra layers of security. However, most wallet apps only require a simple click for its operation. So, if you lose your phone, whoever finds it has control of your wallet. Only thing which may save you is a PIN or fingerprint protection when you send or transfer money. Though all apps are inherently safe, or as safe as your bank account, there are a few things a user has to do to ensure the financial information or money on their phones is not misused.
• The problem of transferring money between different payment systems. Usually the majority of electronic payment systems do not cooperate with each other. In this case, you have to use the services of e-currency exchange, and it can be time-consuming if you still do not have a trusted service for this purpose.
• The lack of anonymity. The information about all the transactions, including the amount, time and recipient are stored in the database of the payment system. And it means the intelligence agency has an access to this information.
• The necessity of Internet access. If Internet connection fails, you cannot get to your online account.
In general, the advantages of electronic payment system outweigh its disadvantages and they have bigger opportunities comparing with ones of traditional wire transfers.

Crisis is a word that all businesses fear. In the good old days – a crisis has to be managed by engaging traditional media and publications from an early onset to minimize the impact on the business’s brand and reputation. However, in today’s digital age – most crisis situations often rear their heads through social media. With the potential to go viral within minutes and attacks coming from sources worldwide, managers should rethink their crisis management strategies and whether their tools are adequate in dealing with them.

Monitoring and tracking social media crises can be a tricky business. Speed is key. By the time it takes to establish a plan and formulate a response, it would often have been too late; social media would have already blown the situation out of proportion. Crisis really tests the management of an organisation and co-ordination within the company. While many companies turn to communication and PR experts to offer insights, why not do it yourself? Circus Social has several tips to share on the 4 phases of managing a crisis.

Pre-Empting a Crisis

Businesses can proactively prepare for a crisis by monitoring specific keywords and discussions online. Particularly on social media, certain keywords would raise alarm bells. For a manufacturing firm, it could be ‘defect’, for a courier delivery service it would be ‘delay’. Regardless, being able to track and monitor the usage of such keywords in relation to your business is vital to stay a step ahead and give you sufficient time to react. This does not mean you have to get your staff to crawl the web 24/7. A smarter way would be to set up alerts that go straight to your inbox when thresholds on certain keyword usage have been reached.

Identify Sources & Channels

So a crisis has occurred, what next? Quick identification of the bearer of bad news is essential to decide the right course of action. While companies develop crisis roadmaps in handling crises, no two crises are the same and require tact in handling. For example, if the majority of your ‘bad press’ is being shared quickly on Twitter amongst influential users with large follower bases – you know you need to spread your holding messages and responses quickly and effectively through the same medium as well. Try and identify influential users (those with high Klout scores) so you can focus your efforts efficiently.

The social sphere is extremely vast with a wide variety of posts. To get through the clutter, there are useful filters to find impactful and viral posts. Impact score of the post indicates the reach of the post (in terms of likes, shares, comments) and the traction score, indicates the virality. Filtering by impact helps you identify the posts that matter the most, both to the public and for your brand. Another useful tool would be an associative word cloud to help spot other related topics that might have been overlooked.

Taking Action

While some experts advocate not taking action and letting the social media storm die down as rapidly as it came, more often than not, it would be wise to acknowledge the issue. If an employee is accused of wrongdoing, or there has been any form of lapses in procedures, some form of accountability and acknowledgement of the issue will pacify the public. Better yet, inform them that investigations are ongoing. You could even win over new fans by providing timely and relevant information, turning a crisis into an opportunity.

Post-crisis remedy

Once traction of the negative post dies down, (hopefully) the worst is over. However, it is still important to be accountable to the public and your customers. At this stage, do release the results of your investigations and be sure to implement measures to prevent a repeat crisis. Also, analyse the traction of past posts and identify and thank fans who have been supportive. It would also be a good time to adjust alerts and thresholds based on what has been learned.

Hopefully, these tips will help any manager take charge of future crises on social media. Get in touch with us to know how 20/Twenty can be part of your crisis management solution.

Growth of 20/Twenty Social Monitoring & Intelligence Platform – Under the Hood

We have often been asked about the challenges we faced in scaling up our technology stack to manage big data. I have attempted to address this in this post which is the first of a series of blog posts on this and similar topics.

20/Twenty was created ground-up as the most intuitive and easy to use cloud based (SaaS) Social Monitoring & Intelligence platform in the world. Based on our deep understanding of what marketers needed and the awesome designs we created, we signed up our first client even before the product was officially launched. The pressure to quickly deliver the first version of the product was intense 🙂

From an engineering point of view, there’s a huge amount of data that we pull (Think Big Data!), process, augment and then visualize in the platform all on a near real-time basis. Imagine someone tweeting and it appears on our platform within a few seconds along with augmented information including Gender, Sentiment, Engagement, Spam score etc.

The evolution of 20/Twenty has already seen a few stages of growth. The graph below shows how 20/Twenty data has grown over the last 2 years since our product launch. This is a really cool growth for a startup like Circus Social both from a business perspective as well as from an engineering standpoint. We used several tricks from the books as well as a few practical hacks to ensure our ability to fetch, process, augment and visualize high volumes of data continued to become better, though this journey was not without pain!

Stage 1

We created over 200 custom marketing applications in our previous avatar at Circus Social working with some of the biggest brands in the world. We used the same open source technologies (PHP / MySQL) to create the first version of 20/Twenty. This worked well and as our data grew in the first few months, we continued to grow vertically by adding more capacity (CPU/RAM).

Most of the queries from the application were read queries whereas a bulk of “write operations” were being performed by our data crawlers. We therefore created an efficient master-slave architecture where the application would read from the slaves and the crawler scripts would write into the master. This worked well in general but the exponential increase in the volume of data meant that certain queries were running extremely slow and impacting the user experience.

Stage 2

Since our data volume was growing exponentially and the relational aspects of the database were not the core of our application, we realized that sooner or later, we would have to move to a NoSQL database. However, the performance issues that were cropping up had to be sorted quickly and without a downtime. We quickly realized that we needed a dedicated search engine and MySQL was not good enough for this purpose.

We explored several options and Elasticsearch came to our rescue here. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine that centrally stores your data in a manner which can be retrieved / read really fast by your applications. Our awesome tech team deployed this in a matter of days. The improvement in performance was remarkable. The plan worked and we cheered!

Stage 3

Word spread in Singapore and Asia about how good our platform was (and our sales team did a good job too!) and we continued to sign up new clients. The volume of data continued to grow for existing clients as well as new clients. The tech stack of MySQL and ElasticSearch did not let us down but we wanted to create an architecture that would scale infinitely, if there’s a thing like that.

In Stage 3, we moved the core of our database from MySQL to Cassandra (Elasticsearch was now interacting with Cassandra) and the backend code from PHP to Node.js. We also migrated most of our front end code to Angular.js for better performance. This was a major architectural change on a live application being used by several clients so we created a parallel production like environment and ran it parallelly for several weeks to ensure everything was working as desired before switching over.

While we did the above, we continued to work on cool new features on the product and opened up our data API’s to a few clients who wanted a deeper integration with their own applications. Other tools we used during this and other stages were Postman, Github and JIRA.

As we scale further from here, we will probably have newer and more exciting technology challenges and we will keep posting about them. If you are excited to work on some of these, do write to us at careers@circussocial.com

The Circus CommandCentre made a fantastic debut at the Spikes Asia 2016 conference in Singapore.
This is a perfect solution for viewing your key brand KPI’s across displays. We enable the use of powerful realtime visualizations for your brand dashboards and war rooms, building on our core social intelligence platform, 20/Twenty.

What’s it about?

In a nutshell –

A smart display solution for viewing all your important data points

Real-time data feeds display

Powerful visualisations of data all tailor-made to suit your requirements

Seamless integration with your existing dashboards/display solutions

What can you do with it?

Daily social media and news monitoring

Daily brand health & KPI monitoring

Campaign monitoring

Data feed display across devices

Integrate as an additional powerful input to your existing dashboards

So MUCH MORE!

If you would like to book a demo, simply click here and we’ll help you get started.

The state-of-the-art partnership will allow customers to combine the prowess of VSocial and 20/Twenty all on one dashboard

Singapore, 2016-Oct-04 — Circus Social, a leading social data analytics company in Asia, announced today a groundbreaking product integration with Vocanic, Asia’s largest full service social media marketing agency offering customers a full suite of social media management capabilities.

This collaboration allows clients to enjoy the best of Circus Social’s 20/Twenty, a next-generation social intelligence platform, and Vocanic’s VSocial, an enterprise social media marketing suite, all under one roof and on either of platforms.

Customers of both platforms now have the chance to listen to and analyse powerful social and news data through 20/Twenty, and use VSocial’s superior publishing features to publish and manage their social presence.

“We are excited about the opportunities this integration will present to clients,” Shreeniwas Iyer, CEO at Vocanic, said. “This enables clients to enjoy a platform that goes across the social spectrum, including listening, proactivity, publishing, engagement and Social CRM. Circus Social has a wonderful product that greatly compliments the capabilities of VSocial. We are delighted about the prospect of accessing new markets and prospective clients through this partnership with Circus Social.”

Ram Bhamidi, CEO at Circus Social, added: “This partnership is unique because it leverages on the social intelligence and data analytics capabilities of Circus Social as well as the publishing and collaboration features of VSocial. This means we now have joint big data capabilities to create really compelling offers for customers of both companies.”

Some of the innovative new features include a full social CRM capability that allows brands to search for and track their customers in real-time through ‘Listen in Social & Key Opinion Leaders’, store details and interaction histories in the Data Warehouse, and schedule content optimized for them through learnings from the Social & Behavioural Profile Insights tool.

About Circus Social Pte. Ltd

Circus Social is a social data analytics company that specializes in digital & social intelligence and analytics platforms. With offices in Singapore and Bangalore, India, Circus Social offers a full suite of social analytics services, including but not limited to, social media & digital listening and monitoring, analytics and reporting, and social intelligence and predictive technology.

Our solutions include:

20/Twenty: 20/Twenty is the world’s most comprehensive social intelligence platform that helps marketers make better business decisions by collecting, augmenting and integrating social, online, offline and premium News with Dow Jones Factiva, on one easy-to-use platform.
Beacon: our proprietary predictive algorithm that allows brands to spot and predict crises, leads and queries.

Vocanic, founded in 2005, is Asia’s leading business focused on Social Media. With capabilities in Strategy, Digital Solutions and Creative, Singapore headquartered Vocanic has offices in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. Operating under the GroupM umbrella, Vocanic can roll out regional programs with on the ground support for each major market.

VOCANIC supports clients to develop and implement strategies that deliver measurable business benefits. Offering services in Social Media Asset Management, Social CRM and Social Media Crisis Management, VOCANIC develops custom branded content designed especially for the social era.

CIRCUS SOCIAL PARTNERS WITH DATASIFT TO GIVE CUSTOMERS ACROSS ASIA ACCESS TO FACEBOOK TOPIC DATA

Circus Social is one of the first companies in Asia to partner with DataSift to provide aggregated and anonymised Facebook topic data.

Singapore- 15th February – Circus Social (www.circus2020.com), a leading social data analytics company in Asia, today announced a partnership with DataSift, the Human Data Intelligence provider, to give access to aggregated and anonymous Facebook topic data for customers. This partnership will allow Circus Social to be one of the first social analytics companies in Asia to offer their clients reports, deep insights and access to Facebook topic data.

Facebook topic data is anonymous and aggregated content data about specific activities, events, brand names, and other subjects that people are sharing on Facebook. Marketers can now go deeper in gathering real insights from real audiences and engage with the topics their customers are interested in. Working with Facebook topic data lets companies make business decisions in real-time, in a variety of applications ranging from content discovery to product development and from audience affinity analysis to brand reputation management.

“There is a huge pool of data and insights now available to companies across the globe,” explains Tim Barker, CEO, DataSift. “Our aim at DataSift is to enable organisations to get real business value from this wealth of unstructured data and use the intelligence gained to drive decisions and answer business questions. Facebook topic data provides companies with an in-depth understanding of their key audiences in a privacy-safe way. It’s fantastic that Circus Social is now partnering with us to provide its clients across Asia with access to anonymous and aggregated Facebook topic data.”

“We are one of the first data analytics companies in Asia to offer Facebook topic data, giving our clients and agency partners access to more insightful demographic data” says Ram Bhamidi, Chief Operating Officer, Circus Social. “Circus Social is delighted to announce this collaboration with DataSift and we are looking forward to launching custom reports and Audience Maps based on Facebook topic data.”

About Circus Social Pte. Ltd
Circus Social is a social data analytics company that specializes in social intelligence and analytics platforms. With offices in Singapore and Banglalore, India, Circus Social offers a full suite of social analytics services, including but not limited to, social media & digital listening and monitoring, analytics and reporting, and social intelligence and predictive technology. For more information, please visit www.circus2020.com

Everyone loves a proactive team. The dream team that always volunteers, is up to try new things and one that uses intuition to sense a crash-and-burn situation.

We wondered why no listening tools out there in the market today offer the same type of ‘pro-active’ features we look for in everyday life?

So we spoke with dozens of marketers to discuss the concept of the world’s first ‘pro-active and pre-emptive’ platform- and they loved the idea!

We also spoke with them about how contingencies are dealt with currently – and how when most crisis situations hit, they are usually followed by chaos and impulsive, panicky decisions.

Share of voice is suddenly monitored,

Sentiment is tracked closely,

Detractors are added to watch lists,

Holding statements are prepared,

And suddenly, a command center has sprung up to help ‘manage’ a situation..…but all of this happens ‘after’.

A lot of the time (but not always), brands, comms teams and agencies are already aware of ’situations’ that could ‘take a turn for the worse’. In these instances more than others, the power of getting a warning and already being prepared has never been easier.

As a result, one of the new features on our platform is the Alerts functionality.

Alerts allows you to customize what matters to you – not just as a whole for your team, but also for you as an individual.

We send our clients ‘signals’ that allow them to be notified of what matters to them, as soon as it happens – without having to log in after you’ve been notified by your boss/ your friend/ a journalist.

Hosting an event? Set up an alert for increases in share of voice- and work with your teams to ensure it stays high.

Heard there was a packaging problem at the factory? Set up a keyword alert for the factory name, location and product details – and have your communications and digital team ready with a holding statement.

Have a feeling that your new brand logo may not be so well-received? Set up an alert to notify you of any changes in sentiment for your topic/ brand – and then respond to how your consumers feel.

We’ve tried to make it easier for brands to be on top of ‘potential’ situations.

This is why we are the world’s first pro-active social media monitoring and insights platform. You set up alerts to reach you in your inbox without having to log in. And once you do need to – simply click on the link and go deeper from your mobile, your tablet or your desktop.

20/Twenty – brings you pro-active perfect vision. Because being passive never really got anyone to where they needed to go.

Before we started building 20/Twenty, we interviewed over a 100 marketing and social media managers who were users of different listening platforms. We found a very interesting thread running through the experiences most marketers had with Listening Platforms.

Stage 1: Encounter aggressive sales pitch

Stage 2: Sign up

Stage 3: Struggle through set up

Stage 4: It’s ready to use!

Stage 5: Hmm…it’s too complicated.

Stage 6: Give it to the intern / account executive.

Stage 7: Ignore the PDF reports that the intern / exec emails once a week.

With this learning in mind, we vowed to build something that is super intuitive and easy to use. Our clients believe we have succeeded in doing so! Find out more here.